Traffic engineering (TE) refers to configuring data plane hardware, including various communications nodes of a network, to route traffic based on information collected from the network. TE is typically used to optimize or improve network traffic communications and resource utilization. Centralized TE may be computationally complex in large networks, and require control signaling that exhibits latency at the network edge. Alternatively, distributed TE architectures may divide the data plane of large networks into TE zones, which may be configured using distributed TE controllers and signaling. The network hardware and nodes are thus assigned to multiple zones, each being managed with less complexity and communication delay than managing the entire network in a central manner. The distributed approach also improves the scalability of implementation. However, since zones may pass traffic between each other, adjacent zones should coordinate their handling of traffic rate and other resources. This coordination can require extensive communication between the different zones, which can increase signaling overhead and latency. Thus, there is a need for schemes to handle traffic flow between zones. This is particularly true when wireless aspects are taken into account, because low latency is desired in wireless networks.